The «news» story circulating online is fabricated to discredit USAID. Bloomberg has not published such stories on its website or social networks. General Brown Jr. has also not made such statements.
Social media users are sharing a 40-second video with the Bloomberg logo, which claims that between 2020 and 2022, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) allegedly invested about $20 billion in creating and developing biolabs in Ukraine.
The video also features a comment by the Joint Chief of Staff chairman, General Charles Brown Jr. He allegedly claimed that with the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2022, the United States allegedly lost control of the biolabs. «This case is the second largest one-time loss of American money and property, after the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. We lost everything again overnight», the general allegedly said.
Some users are commenting on the video, claiming: «Apparently, with the arrival of Trump, the presence of biolabs in Ukraine has ceased to be “Kremlin propaganda”.»
This information is not true. The purpose of the fake is to discredit the activities of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Ukraine.
The video clip circulating online imitates the design of the Bloomberg news agency. In the upper right corner of the video, you can see the company’s logo, but there is no such video on the official website or social networks of the American media source Bloomberg. Moreover, despite the use of the logo, the design inconsistency (font and inscriptions design) indicates that this is a fake. It is also worth noting that most Bloomberg videos are published without the logo.
When the media uses someone else’s videos or photos, they indicate the source. However, this video is merely a compilation of various fragments taken from stock platforms.
The «quote» by General Charles Brown Jr. is also fabricated. The general never made such statements. To create the fake video, propagandists used a fragment of a video recording of the general, published on the US Air Force page. In this video, Charles Brown Jr. does not mention any biolaboratories in Ukraine. The video is dedicated to his three-year service as Chief of Staff of the US Air Force.
According to the Osavul platform, the first to spread this video was the Russian channel in Telegram George Ivensiya. This channel is also active on TikTok and is included in the list of Kremlin propagandists compiled by the Center for Countering Disinformation under Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council and Ukraine’s Security Service Cyber Department.
The Kremlin’s disinformation about the alleged existence of US biolabs in Ukraine is part of Russia’s ongoing efforts to discredit Ukraine and its partners. In this way, the propaganda is trying to create an image of a threat associated with biological weapons. In fact, there are no secret laboratories for developing biological weapons in Ukraine, and such statements are baseless manipulations aimed at undermining international support for Ukraine.
StopFake has repeatedly analized propaganda narratives about the alleged existence of US biolabs in Ukraine. You can read more about this in the stories Fake: US is Building New Secret Biolabs in Ukraine and Fake: Biological Weapons Development Labs Operated in Ukraine.
